The Sun Labs team has been working on solving a problem that developers face when trying to create applications that take full advantage of the chip multiprocessing (CMP) technologies on processors such as the Sun Rock chip. The answer is "transactional memory," which helps synchronize concurrent access to shared memory by multiple threads.

"The programming issue is the most serious challenge to the future of high-performance computing," said Dr. James Mitchell, Sun Fellow, vice president, and director of Sun's HPC research. "But Sun Labs is making significant progress with its work on transactional memory. We foresee a day when developers will not have to embed the intricacies of concurrent systems in their code to build concurrent programs—and when businesses can scale the program without scaling the programmers."

Sun Labs engineers are working with engineers in the Sun Microelectronics division to support transactional memory, which is imminent for commercial Sun products.

"The nice thing about transactional memory is it makes it so much easier to do concurrent programs," Mark Moir, senior staff engineer at Sun Labs said (in an interivew with InternetNews.com). "It doesn't require hardware support; people can write them today. When Rock comes along, performance will significantly improve."

Read more about software-based transactional memory (STM), DSTM2, a Java-based software library that provides a flexible framework for implementing STM, and hybrid systems by accessing the Feature on the Sun Labs research site. [...read more...]

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